The Golden Son of Srinjaya

Night had come down over the Kuru camp thick and wrong, the kind of dark that seemed to have poured in through the tent flaps rather than simply fallen, and inside the command tent Yudhishthira sat as he had sat for hours, not moving, a king who had stopped being able to hold the shape of a king. Abhimanyu was dead. Sixteen years old, Arjuna's son, Subhadra's son, walked into the coiled trap of the chakravyuha because his father was elsewhere and his uncle's word had sent him in anyway, promising support that never came, and the boy had died alone inside a ring of the greatest warriors alive, cut down after his weapons broke, after his chariot broke, after everything broke except the boy himself, who apparently could not be made to stop fighting until six men together made certain of it.

'I sent him,' Yudhishthira said, not for the first time that night, to no one in particular, to the lamp, to his own hands. 'I needed the formation broken and I sent a boy who had learned half the way in and none of the way out, and I told myself Satyaki and Bhima would follow him through, and they did not reach him, and he is dead, and I am the one who decided he should go in.'

It was Krishna who first heard the tent flap move, and looked up, and rose without surprise, because some arrivals a person simply recognizes before they are announced. Vyasa entered as he always entered, without ceremony, an old man with the weight of every story ever told sitting easily on him, and he looked once at the wrecked king before he sat, and did not offer comfort, because he had never been a teacher who mistook comfort for help.

'I will not tell you it was not your doing,' Vyasa said. 'It was. I will not tell you grief is unearned. It is not. But I have carried a story a long time waiting for a man ready to hear it rightly, and I think, Yudhishthira, that tonight you have become that man, however little you wanted the becoming. Listen, if you can bear one more thing tonight.'

'There was once a king named Srinjaya,' Vyasa began, 'who ruled well and ruled long and lacked only one thing that every king in every age seems to lack until the story is ready to give it to him or take it from him for good: he had no son. His queen had given him daughters he loved and no heir, and the kingdom's future sat in his chest like a stone he carried everywhere and could put down nowhere.

'It happened that the sage Narada and the sage Parvata came traveling through Srinjaya's country, and the king, who understood hospitality as a duty owed even to those who asked nothing, served them with such devotion - his own hands at the washing, his own voice at the welcome, no servant allowed to stand between his gratitude and its object - that the sages were moved past the ordinary courtesy a king's welcome earns. Ask, they told him, for whatever you lack, and it will be granted, because a heart like yours should not go on carrying a stone it did not choose.

'Srinjaya asked for a son. And Narada, who of the two sages carried the greater gift to give that day, granted one, but granted him strangely, the way boons in the old stories are so often strange, carrying inside their generosity a seed of the very grief they seem to be curing. The boy who was born to Srinjaya's queen was named Suvarnashthivin, which means the one who spits gold, for whatever his infant body touched or shed - his sweat, his spittle, the very dirt he played in - turned to gold beneath him, as though the boy were not a child at all but a treasury that had somehow learned to laugh and crawl and demand milk.

'You may imagine the rejoicing. A kingdom that had feared for its succession now had an heir who could, it seemed, fund a hundred years of that succession simply by existing. Srinjaya's treasury swelled without a single tax raised. Guards who had once watched borders were set instead to watch a nursery, because the greatest wealth in the kingdom now slept in a cradle and cried when it was hungry like any other child, gold or no gold notwithstanding.'

'A treasure that walks is a treasure that can be walked away with, and there is no guard thorough enough, in the end, to watch a temptation for every hour of every year forever. The story does not linger on how it happened - only that it did. A band of robbers, having heard what every trader and pilgrim in three kingdoms had by then heard, that Srinjaya's son shed gold the way other children shed milk-teeth, came for the boy as men come for any treasure they have decided is worth a killing.

'They took him from the palace grounds in the dark and carried him deep into the forest, away from any road a search party might think to walk, and there, meaning to harvest what they had stolen at their leisure and far from any rescue, they killed him - quickly, without more cruelty than the theft itself already was, because their business was gold and not suffering, or so they told themselves as men telling themselves such things always do.

'And then they found nothing. No gold lay in the boy's small body once the life had left it. No gold clung to the leaves where he had fallen, none in the dirt beneath him, none anywhere a robber's frantic hands could search by torchlight in a forest at night. Whatever had made the child gold had been the child's life itself, inseparable from it, spent the instant the life was spent, and the robbers stood over an ordinary dead boy in the dark, having killed for a fortune that had died in the same moment as its bearer and left them nothing at all to show for the killing.

'When the news reached Srinjaya - not gently, there is no gentle way such news arrives - the king did not weep as a man weeps who has lost wealth. He wept as a man weeps who has lost his son, which was, of course, the whole of what he had actually lost, though it took the robbers' failure to find any gold to make the kingdom understand that the boy had never truly been a treasury to begin with, only a child who happened to shed one.'

'Srinjaya's grief, when it came, came annihilating - the sort that does not diminish with the ordinary mercy of days, because it fed on something more than loss, though the king could not yet have named what. He would not eat, would not hold court, sat for hours where the boy had once played, staring at ordinary dirt that no longer turned to gold beneath anything.

'It was Narada who came to him a second time, as he had come once already bearing a gift the king had not known how to ask for correctly. The sage sat with the ruined father a long while before he spoke, and what he offered was not comfort.

'"Srinjaya," Narada said, "tell me honestly, and I will know if you lie to yourself even if you do not lie to me. When you grieve tonight, what do you grieve - your son, who reached for you before he could stand, who was simply yours before he was anything else? Or the gold that went with him, the treasury that closed the day he closed his eyes? I think you have been mourning a fortune and calling it a son, and that is why the grief will not lift. A man cannot mourn correctly what he never understood correctly while it lived."

'Srinjaya wept a long while before he could answer, and the answer, when it came, was true, because Narada had a way of leaving nothing but truth standing in a room. He confessed he had loved the boy as a father loves a son - but also, unadmitted even to himself, as a kingdom loves its treasury: guards set thicker on the nursery than on his own grieving heart, the boy shown off to visiting kings like a vault. He had loved his son as treasure, and treasure, Narada told him gently, is always taken from those who love it as treasure. Grieve the child. Not the gold. There is a difference, and until tonight he had not fully known it.

'Because Srinjaya wept then only for his son, nothing of a treasury's owner left in the weeping, Narada restored the boy to him living - not a reward for grieving correctly, but because a father who has learned at last to see his child instead of his child's gold is a father to whom a child can safely be given back.'

Vyasa let the story settle before he spoke again in his own voice, the frame closing back around the tale the way it had opened. 'This is the story I once told another grieving father whose own son had died in war, and it stands beside another telling I have given elsewhere, of sixteen great kings who all died and are all still remembered though not one returned to life - that roll is its own story, for another night. Tonight I give you only this half of the teaching, because it is the half you need.

'I do not tell you this so you will expect Abhimanyu given back to you living, Yudhishthira. He will not be. That mercy was Narada's to give a father who had misunderstood his son as gold, and Abhimanyu's death carries no such misunderstanding to be corrected. He did not die because anyone mistook him for treasure. He died as a warrior dies, inside a formation he had the courage to enter though he had not been taught the way back out, fighting past the point where lesser men would have begged, until it took six of the greatest warriors alive acting together to end him. No revival could add anything to that death. It is already whole, already worth exactly what it is worth, which is a great deal, and grief that spends its nights totting up what might have been, what a boy's whole unlived life was worth in the counting - that grief has mistaken the boy for treasure the same way Srinjaya once did, weighing a person on a scale built for gold.

'Grieve him, Yudhishthira. Grieve him completely; I would think less of you if you did not. But grieve your nephew, and not the years he was cheated of, not the king he might have become, not the debt his death has left you owing to Arjuna. Grieve the boy who reached for his father before he could stand. That grief will end somewhere. The other kind never does, because it is measuring a person against a fortune, and a person was never that kind of thing to begin with.'